The dApp Developer Stack: The Blockchain Industry Barometer

I currently look at the development of the blockchain ecosystem through the lens of creating a new decentralized application development stack. A good barometer is asking the question: “do we have all the parts of the stack we need to create a fully decentralized app”? When the answer to that question is “yes!”, the ecosystem can rapidly create decentralized applications and experience explosive mainstream growth.

I came to this view after a painful period in 2014 at Coinbase. We had been sitting around thinking there would be tons of apps, yet we were seeing almost none. And I believe the reason was (and still is) that many of the critical pieces of the decentralized app development stack were missing.

Similar to building a normal web or mobile app, creating a dApp commonly requires a few things: computation, file storage, external data, monetization, and payments. Here’s what the state of the dApp developer stack looked like in 2014:

And here’s what it looks like in 2017:

Using a 0–2 scale (0=not started, 1=in progress, 2=ready), the stack was 20% complete in 2014 and is 70% complete in 2017. Many parts of the stack that have been recently created are fragile and may fail or have a successor, but I believe this is directionally correct.

The community has made a lot of progress. While it was borderline impossible to build a dApp in 2014, in 2017 it’s feasible to build a basic dApp that requires minimal computation and file storage. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was possible to build a reasonably scalable dApp by the end of 2018. As a result, I think we are sitting much closer to broad adoption now than we were in 2014.